


The Games Kids Play

by Silex



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dysfunctional Family, Game: Resident Evil 7, Gen, How Do I Tag, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28945887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: While trying to focus on the work he needs to do and stay out of Evie's way at the same time, Lucas finds himself remembering a very particular game he and his sister used to play.
Kudos: 4
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	The Games Kids Play

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/gifts).



Evie wasn’t in his head, Lucas reminded himself for the dozenth time as he forced himself to take a deep breath and slow down.

He hated slowing down, even for a few minutes to gather his racing thoughts, but he had to.

Evie wasn’t in his head the same way she was with Ma and Pa. They saw her all around, acted like she was there and he played along, couldn’t let them suspect anything, not that they would. Zoe though, she was a tricky one. Like him she’d turned tail and run when things started to get too weird, hiding herself away and maybe sparing herself from the worst of what Evie did, but she wasn’t like him.

Zoe wasn’t like him, but she wasn’t like Ma and Pa either, she might suspect things and if she wasn’t alone in her head then Evie might pick up on it.

He couldn’t let _her_ suspect anything. Not when her suspicions would go straight to Ma and Pa and Pa had gotten too quick to punish them lately.

Usually it was Zoe who took the brunt of it, which made him wonder.

Did she see Evie everywhere like Ma and Pa did, or had her running away and hiding when things got interesting helped at all? She wasn’t dead, so there was that, and maybe the way she kept trying to help their _guests_ was just another kind of crazy.

She’d isolated herself in that little trailer of hers, the nowhere mobile he’d called it when she first bought it, going nowhere just like she was.

Especially now, none of them were going anywhere.

Including himself, but that was only for now, he had reports to write, new developments to let the boss know about.

Whoever the boss even was.

Ever since they’d first given him the jab, vaccine, blocker, whatever it was supposed to be, not a cure, sure as hell there, he’d owed them something.

Lucas didn’t want to be cured, not when Pa was still chop happy at the dinner table and Ma was…

She was even less reasonable than normal, no longer letting that he was her precious baby-boy stop her.

He wondered, awful, creeping wondering, if what he’d seen, some of what she’d said to him hadn’t just been her being crazy from Evie like his bosses had said she’d go. Pa was pretty brutal, fun to watch when someone else was on the receiving end, but Ma, she said things.

Crazy rambling things about Evie being a blessing, a late child, a wonderful gift for them all to share, but some of it got downright _mean_ when it wasn’t about wonderful, creepy little Evie.

Faithfully he’d reported the incidents, getting emails back, about how such things were ‘normal’, ‘expected’ and telling him what to look for next in the progression of things.

Because it was a progression to an end and the end wasn’t far now.

Thankfully.

Because Pa was getting more and more violent and Ma was getting crazier than ever.

And because the wondering ate at him.

Gnawed at him like a fucking rat in that one story he’d had to read in high school.

He’d picked that passage to read out loud in front of the class, knowing full well that the one girl two seats in front of him and one to the left, was terrified of rats.

Little know it all, acting all high and mighty because she got the best grades, like that mattered.

An interactive learning experience it had been, watching her sit there, kind of in shock, letting out a little gagging noise and then running out the door screaming. That’d gotten them out of one boring class for the day at least.

He pushed his chair back, paced around his workshop in the barn in the hopes that the moving would shake some thoughts loose.

One of the nice things about Evie was that she’d given him a lot of chances to tinker and try things that he’d always wanted to. It didn’t matter if he got caught because as long as Evie thought it was funny it was fine.

And Evie’s sense of humor matched his just fine.

Unlike Zoe’s, though she did have some idea of how playing tricks worked, even if she’d gotten to be more of a stick in the mud lately.

He’d have thought that Evie would have gotten her to lighten up some, join in the fun, but instead she just hid herself away from it all.

His bosses said that was normal and expected too, but they didn’t know Zoe like he did.

She knew how to have fun if you pushed her just right.

Smiling to himself as a thought clicked into place, jarred by a memory, he looked up to the shelf where he’d kept a reminder of the games he and Zoe had played as kids.

It wasn’t there.

Fucking rats!

They’d eaten it!

Eaten it and left a smudge of rot on the shelf where it should have been. Droppings and a few wisps of fur and fluff.

Had always been, ever since…

He wasn’t sure how old he’d been when the idea came to him – a harmless prank to play on his sister.

Harmless as long as Ma and Pa didn’t catch him that was.

They hadn’t been watching him too hard, so he’d have to have been about thirteen, not older than fifteen because by then they’d gotten pretty suspicious.

No, it was sixteen where it had gotten bad, when he’d been old enough to start learning to drive.

So he’d been…

How old he’d been hadn’t mattered, just that he’d had an idea.

He’d seen a show about Rube Goldberg machines and decided to make one for himself, didn’t really have a clue what it would do, just that it would be fun to build and when he was about half way done with it he figured that having a ball rolling along the track wasn’t enough fun.

Now a live, frightened rat on the other hand, that would be something!

So he’d built a rat trap, which had been a sort of Rube Goldberg machine too, because that was half the fun.

He’d baited it with the crust from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before school.

It was definitely before school, because listening to Zoe while they waited for the bus had been what caused everything that followed.

She’d been going on and on about how her class was doing valentines cards for everyone and Ma would be taking her to the store after school to get cards for all her friends.

Ones with robots for the boys and ones with horses for the girls, she’d said.

And he’d had to listen to her little kid rambling the whole way to school too, because all the other seats were taken and she had to sit next to him.

What kept him from screaming at her to shut up was the thought of testing his maze-machine with a real live rat when he got home.

They were supposed to be good at mazes, learning them real fast, so he’d let it go through once to learn and then start adding tricks and traps, see how far it could make it as he made things tougher and tougher and more and more dangerous.

Only he didn’t end up catching a rat, he ended up with a squirrel, a big, fat, fluffy one that had too much fight in it for its own good judging by the state the trap had been in when he found it in the afternoon. It had broken the mechanism while trying to get out then stuck its head through a hole it had pushed between some of the wires and then broke its neck.

The absolute worst part was that he needed to take the trap apart to get it out.

He’d been so mad at Zoe and her valentines that he got an idea.

That was how most of his best ideas got started, he’d get mad at someone and then decide to play a trick on them and if sometimes those tricks went poorly for the victim, well, that was their fault for getting him upset in the first place.

He found an old cigar box that he’d used to store random junk, dumped it out and set to work decorating the box with craft supplies he liberated from Zoe’s room. Brightly colored craft paper, glitter and whatever else he could find that looked like something she’d like.

It was an awful mess when he was done, but the kind of mess he was sure his sister would love. The kind where she’d probably show all her little friends, get them together in a circle, real close before opening it, which was exactly what he wanted.

A big surprise for her and her friends, one none of them would ever forget.

Once all the glue was done drying he took a spring and some bits of wire that he’d been using in his Rube Goldberg machine, they’d been part of a mechanism that was supposed to launch a dart at a balloon, but he hadn’t figured out what the balloon exploding was supposed to do.

He’d figured that it would work just fine for a launching a dead squirrel across a room, except the stupid thing was too heavy.

Fixing that was as easy as skinning the thing, something he’d actually knew from practice thanks to Uncle Joe showing him how to do it with a water snake.

When all was said and done he was pretty proud of himself and it actually made the trick work better because he was able to wrap the squirrel skin around one of the darts he’d been using.

After the first test, where he made sure to be very careful, opening the box away from himself, he ended up removing the tip from the dart because a dead squirrel flying at someone’s face was one thing, but a squirrel flying at someone’s face and sticking there or putting their eye out was a ‘nother thing all together.

A hilarious thing, but something that might of got him in trouble if it happened to Zoe or one of her friends. Especially if Pa realized some of his darts were missing.

So he might have been closer to fifteen when it had all happened, because Pa had definitely started keeping an eye on him, probably because of what he’d done to the old lawnmower the fall before.

Zoe had gotten the blame for that, but it had been a close call.

Breaking the lawnmower was the kind of thing that she’d do, and Pa hadn’t even bothered to try and figure out where the blade had gone off to.

Which meant it might have been his fifteenth birthday when what mattered happened.

When the day came, he had the box ready, all tied up with a piece of ratty ribbon that he’d found around the house, and a note that said it was from ‘a very secret, very special admirer’.

He snuck it to school in his backpack and when he knew Zoe’s class was at lunch, he said that he’d needed to go to the bathroom and snuck in into her desk.

Then he spent the rest of the day hardly able to keep still, waiting to see the look on her face when she met him at the bus, or maybe even hear the screams all the way across the building.

Except that wasn’t how it happened.

She’d been on the bus by the time he got there and she’d glared at him as he walked by, but she didn’t say anything.

That was fine, probably better that she didn’t realize it was him. Lucas was sure the whole story would come out over dinner that night, a tearful telling of the awful, embarrassing day she’d had.

Except she kept quiet through the whole meal, shrugging when Ma asked her about how the cards she’d given out went over and if she got any good ones.

 _Just some candies and stuff_ , had been her answer.

And she’d glanced at him sidelong when she said _stuff_.

By the time his birthday rolled around he’d forgotten all about everything.

But Zoe hadn’t, not at all.

He couldn’t tell how long she’d been plotting and planning and working in secret to do what she did, because he couldn’t imagine her keeping a secret like that.

She knew how much he liked his birthday though, a whole day where he was the most important person in the whole wide world.

And she’d been waiting for him, bright and early outside his room.

Waiting with a box.

An enormous box, so big that it was wrapped up with paper grocery bags.

 _Happy birthday_ , she’d said, in a quiet voice, half embarrassed, half angry.

He looked at her, ready to walk past the box, not because he expected a trick, but because he knew it’d bother her.

But the box was nearly as big as she was and walking past something addressed to ‘the best brother in the world’ didn’t sit right with him.

That was too much like waiting and he hated waiting.

So he tore away the paper revealing a battered plain, old cardboard box.

Inside that was another box, wrapped in more paper bags.

And that kind of got him going because it was a mystery.

Three boxes down he finally reached a gift bag left over from Christmas, covered in snowmen and trees. Inside that was another box, this one properly wrapped.

And inside that was another box, and another, and another, each wrapped and done up like a proper gift.

And that was the worst part, the absolute worst part of it.

He wanted to know what was in there, like an itch in his brain, but he couldn’t scratch it because there was always another box.

Right down to a plain old shoebox, and inside that, wrapped in brightly colored tissue paper was…

Enormous gleaming eyes, solid black and pure evil.

He dropped the box and the thing fell out, letting him get a good look at it.

It was the squirrel, except it was all sewn back up and stuffed with tissues or something to give it shape.

She’d put a pair of shiny black buttons far too big for its head over its empty eye holes and…

“Zoe,” he’d said, sitting down because he was so angry, “You can’t give a prank back to someone.”

He didn’t shout though, because if he got Ma and Pa’s attention they’d come and want to know what was going on.

The next day, to prove his point, he put the squirrel in her pillow.

So she’d picked the lock to his bedroom door and left it sitting in one of his trophies.

It ended up in her lunch box after that, then his sock drawer.

Back and forth it went, a silent exchange of a stuffed squirrel, neither one of them willing to admit defeat in an absurd contest of wills.

Sometimes it would take her a week to find it, hidden in her closet, the pocket of her winter coat or sitting on top of the box where she kept her old diaries.

Sometimes he’d nearly forget about it until he went to work on some project and find it in his toolbox.

Until it ended up on a shelf in his workshop and he’d let it stay there, because he didn’t like the way she always managed to get into his stuff to give it back.

There were places he didn’t want her snooping and things he didn’t want her to find, even then. There had been a few times the squirrel was found dangerously close to those places, an unspoken warning with evil button eyes.

 _I know_.

And looking up at it sitting there had given him something to smile about.

The one time his sister had tried to prank him.

And now he wondered, stupid, aching wondering that only came well after the fact, How long had it been since he’d looked for it there?

It was damp in the barn, especially in winter and it had been a wet spring.

There had been plenty of wet springs.

He’d been distracted, takin it for granted that a stupid little stuffed squirrel would always be there for him to look at.

“Stupid rats! Stupid squirrel!”

He screamed, hearing rats in the rafters scatter as he swept the project he’d been working on off his work bench.

“Stupid –”

He cut himself off there, laughing at his own cleverness saving him.

Evie wasn’t there, wasn’t in his head, but Ma wandered, and Pa could have been out back, putting on some show for Evie, whether she was there or not.

And Zoe snooped, the squirrel, even absent, was a reminder of that.

And Zoe suspected things because she’d been smart before.

Not as smart as him, but smart and maybe Evie hadn’t addled her brains that much.

If she heard him she’d snoop more.

Snoop and ask questions.

And she was sneaky, like a snake.

Or a rat.

A sneaky fucking rat.

She might follow him, wonder where he was hiding.

She knew to keep away from the barn. Watching her learn that lesson had been hilarious, seeing her drag herself through the mud after stepping on the tripwire.

She’d been a mess then.

But he’d be the one who ended up a mess if she followed him to the old mine and saw what was set up there.

She wasn’t as smart as him and Evie did have her hooks in Zoe’s brain, but she’d know.

And Evie or no, she’d be mad at him.

He could handle that, her being mad at him. She’d been mad before, like after the time he’d locked her in the basement as a joke.

It was just that if she messed things up too much for him his bosses would be mad too.

His nebulous, high and mighty bosses, far away wherever they were.

Bosses who’d promised him a job if he proved himself with this one.

He just had to watch and write down what he saw.

They wouldn’t care about a stupid gift from his sister years ago.

Stupid, all of it.

They’d care about what had happened to the last guests his family had though, that had gotten messy fast, but in the fun way.

He could write about that and try to calm down.

Try to ignore the fact that even if Evie wasn’t in his head, he could hear those things she made slinking and squelching around.

He’d get it all written down on his computer, the one he had hidden in the mines because the stuff on there, about the way of fixing what Evie had done to them, and what Evie was and who made her, was all on it too, because he needed all that information for his work.

To be safe he’d make sure to get Evie and her little friends nice and riled up before he went, to give Zoe something to keep busy with.

Because even if Evie wasn’t in his head that squirrel was, the stupid, long gone squirrel.

It was gone, it had to be, but for some reason he had the thought and then it got stuck to his brain, that when he got to the mine and went to sit down at his computer there, nice and quiet, away from Evie and sneaky Zoe, the squirrel would be there, sitting on next to the computer, looking at him with button eyes full of the purest evil like some demented velveteen rabbit.

Because maybe it hadn’t rotted away or gotten eaten.

Maybe that was just a trick and Zoe had decided that it was time for their old game to start up again…


End file.
